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Digital banking is evolving from being simply online bank-account management to encompass offering a variety of financial products and services. Multi-national banking operations now must expend significant resources to maintain compliance with the regulations in many jurisdictions.

Mistakes that create a compliance failure can be extremely costly with record fines being imposed on many major banks for illegal practices, money laundering, and other regulatory violations.

Digital Banking Compliance

Digital banking compliance has the added risk exposure of needing to maintain strict compliance in multiple countries for cross-border transactions along with the increased risk of losses due to cyber-attacks and fraud.

The key compliance issues facing the banking industry, as reported by McKinsey, include:

1. More Active Compliance Department — There is a change in the role of the compliance department from being in solely an advisory position to now taking on an active role to directly participate in risk management.
3. Focus on Residual Risk — Instead of monitoring and documenting all risks and all controls, there is more focus on the management of residual risk by using breakpoints in the critical processes. This helps to ensure that any material risk is noticed. The goal is to have the breakpoints trigger a response that is risk-based with enough oversight and remediation efforts made before a problem gets out of control.
5. Integration: The governance of risk management with regulations is achieved by a risk management framework that is fully integrated to work with a bank’s operational-risk protocols and procedures.

Bank Fraud

Bank fraud remains a major concern for banking compliance and risk management. The numbers are staggering. In the United States, bank fraud exceeds $2.2 billion per year and is increasing.

KPMG Global Bank Fraud Survey (2019) reports that the types of fraud are:

• Credit and Debit Card Fraud — Bank card fraud accounts for 53% of the total, which is about $1.3 billion annually in America. Another $17 billion in fraud attempts are blocked each year.
• Social Engineering Fraud — The FBI reports that business email spoofing of American companies resulted in $12 billion in losses from 2013 to 2018, which averages to over $2 billion per year.
• Scams — There were 152,595 scams reported by victims from July 2015 to April 2019. There are romance scams, lottery scams, tax payment scams, and “too good to be true” financial scams. Banks are often blamed for the losses from these scams even though the account holders are the ones usually making the mistake of giving account information to criminals. Elderly people are targeted frequently. Push payment scams are used to gain a customer’s trust, then access personal information, and then take over their bank accounts.
• Cyber and Online Fraud — Identity theft continues to be a major problem with billions of users’ account information breached by hacking attacks. Some of the biggest breaches in the past decade were Yahoo (3.5 billion accounts), Marriott Hotel (500 million records), Adult Friend Finder (412 million accounts), eBay (148 million accounts), Equifax (148 million people), Target (110 million people), and Facebook (50 million accounts).

Compliance with regulatory issues related to fraud are serious concerns and whether a bank, a merchant, or a customer is responsible can become a matter of significant dispute and this matter settled differently depending on the laws of a specific location that has jurisdiction.

Money Laundering

Money laundering compliance failures caused banks to pay many billions of dollars in fines. HSBC ($1.9 billion), Standard Chartered Bank ($1.1 billion fine), Deutsche Bank ($12.5 billion in fines since 2000), and UBS ($5.1 billion fine) are just some banks fined huge amounts.

Banks are required to file suspicious activity reports with various government organizations that monitor financial crimes like FinCEN in the United States and other regulatory bodies in the EU and the UK, which passed the Sanction and Anti-Money Laundering Act in 2018.

‘Know Your Customer’ Rules

Digital banking has more money laundering risk because of the opportunity for banking transactions to occur without ever having seen the person who owns or controls the account. Billions of dollars move through the international banking system in a day.

The real ownership of an account and the source of funds can be hidden from the bank. False identification documents and shell corporations are frequently used to open bank accounts for illicit transactions.

When banks fail to file suspicious activity reports and fail to take appropriate actions to stop money laundering, they are subject to severe prosecution and enormous fines This is why banks are spending billions of dollars to try to stay in compliance with anti-money-laundering regulations. Digital banking further complicates this issue.

Cross-Border Issues

Banks typically have many cross-border issues. Even if there are no branches in a country, the use of a bank card by a customer, to buy something or get cash from an ATM, can trigger local compliance issues. The biggest challenge is the massive amount of complex regulations that continually change. Thomas Reuters reports that there were more than 56,000 regulatory changes in 2017 related to banking.

Compliance with regulations is made more challenging with the innovations happening in digital banking. It makes it more difficult when regulations have not yet caught up with the technological advancements in mobile apps, trading systems, cryptocurrencies, advisory systems, and digital assets.

Many times, the technology runs ahead of the regulations, such as the use of encryption for the messaging system called WhatsApp that is now owned by Facebook. When laws come into being that regulates an innovation, it may be a long time after some service is already in use by millions and quite popular.

An example of these challenges is the recently passed Australian data encryption law. The law requires online companies that use encryption to have a “back-door” key to give the Australian government access.

This means if Facebook wants to be available to Australians, it must break its product WhatsApp to create a way for the Australian government to be able to read everyone’s encrypted messages. That destroys one of WhatsApp’s main features. This is extremely difficult for Facebook to do. It would cost a fortune and Facebook could lose millions of customers for WhatsApp in the rest of the world.

The new Australian regulations are severe for any company doing business in Australia. The definition of what it means to do business in Australia is very broad. Outsourcing work to companies that have some workers in Australia may be enough to trigger the need for compliance with Australian law. What will companies like Facebook do in response to this new Australian encryption law? That remains to be seen.

Open-Banking

Open-Banking is a tremendous innovation. However, it is also creating significant risk, new challenges, and in some countries increased compliance issues where Open-Banking is a regulatory requirement. Open-Banking is a system for banks to give third parties access to customer data. It started in the UK and now it is becoming the standard in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Israel, Mexico New Zealand, and Singapore.

The challenge for Open-Banking is the reliance on third-party controls. However, Open-Banking is meant to create a more accurate and detailed master customer database across all banking and fintech systems to help prevent and detect fraud and to make it easier to recover losses.

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Artificial intelligence is providing more insight and better automation for businesses of all sizes in all industries. It is proving itself as a powerful tool to reduce repetitively, eliminate money and timewasting tasks, as well as increase what businesses can learn from their customer data.

What are the applications of artificial intelligence in banking?

NCR says that AI can do more than just automate tasks for banks. “…Banks should be looking at the bigger picture – how AI can not only save costs, but also open up new opportunities to design and deliver next-generation services, and revolutionize customer experience? Rather than being perceived as a replacement for people, AI can be deployed to do simple, monotonous jobs that don’t require the human touch.

Consequently, the human resources within an organization are given the time to focus on more complex, nuanced jobs that could ultimately prove much more valuable, such as engaging with customers and designing new products.”

Customers who interact with banks digitally create a lot of data for banks and financial institutions to gather, analyze, and act on. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques can help businesses track and understand what the needs and wants of their customers are, ultimately using this data to create better products for customers and enhancing their overall experience with your business.

Customer intelligence, as defined by Aspire Systems is “the process of gathering and analyzing information regarding customers, and their details and activities, to build deeper and more effective customer relationships and improve decision-making. CI helps businesses create an ideal customer profile, predict their wants and dislikes and engage customers at an emotional level. It also gives a better insight into the customer persona thus enabling improved targeted marketing and better analysis of customer complaints.” Ultimately. AI works to make it faster and easier to make smarter business decisions, using the plethora of business data available. This customer intelligence data can grow your business, give you a competitive advantage, and help you remain innovative.

Artificial intelligence in banking to improve the customer experience

Is using artificial intelligence in banking a good use of your business resources? Here are some of the customer experience benefits that AI can drive in your business and use customer intelligence data to improve the banking experience for customers.

1. Better personalization for a better customer

Banks aren’t retail, but they do sell products like loans, accounts, and investment services, so they need to be turned into customer data to find out how to personalize their offers to customers. Showcasing your additional abilities and products to existing companies can help drive your revenue, and using AI to help you not just understand what the smartest recommendation is but also how to develop the most personalized content that can be delivered at the right time.

2. Improved trust and customer loyalty

The Royal Bank of Scotland has 17 million customers and like most businesses, particularly banks, used upsell tactics with existing customers in order to build revenue. Some customers found this too aggressive and weren’t turned off by their efforts and marketing communications. AI helped businesses transform their customer outreach. In this particular bank’s case, this meant reaching out based on customer behavior and creating conversations that mattered, such as reaching out with advice to customers who continuously overdraft their accounts.

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Virtual reality is now a real option in the twenty-first century. There are more than 171 million virtual reality users across the globe. The global market of virtual reality is worth $16.8 billion.

Have you ever wondered why virtual reality is so popular and how renowned brands have made VR their primary marketing strategy?

Why Is Virtual Reality Popular?

• It improves our lives through full sensory immersion.
• It is going to commence the rise of virtual social networks.
• It augments the ability to learn complex things.
• It provides ground for difficult circumstances.
• It augments accessibility through a lower-price budget.

Marketing has always been a crucial part of any business. Whether you own a business start-up or a renowned personal brand, you’re always trying to devise effective content marketing strategies using cutting-edge technology. Those days are long gone when traditional marketing was enough to take your business to its full potential. Now, marketers are taking one step further and using the 3D virtual reality and augmented reality to create effective content marketing strategies.

Your content marketing strategies need to be captivating and convincing. The real question is, “How can you make your content marketing strategy captivating and convincing?” Through real-time experience and real-time experience can only be leveraged through 3D virtual reality.

Create Killing Content Marketing Strategies Using 3D Virtual Reality

Generally, there are four Virtual reality experiences that you can create. Several programming languages are used to create an innovative virtual reality experience. Before learning how to create a 3D virtual reality content marketing strategy, here are the four 3D virtual reality applications that we’d like you to get familiar with:

Leverage Live Videos:

By creating an action video live in virtual reality, you can allow your consumer to see the virtual reality videos from your perspective or from a unique selling point of view. This creates the illusion that your consumers are there in the videos, hence improving the marketing strategy.

Live Photos Works:

Live photo sessions now serve as a winning marketing tactic among different marketing scenarios. Marketing your products in 360-degree photos really put a lasting impression and are one of the best ways to engage more users without spending much on production.

Make 3D Virtual Reality Videos:

3D Virtual Reality Videos is animating or creating services and products that you can use further to market products in a better way. It basically allows the user to see the product or the impact of the service in a 3-dimensional plane giving a real-life demonstration. Your consumers definitely need 3D virtual reality videos to understand your products’ concept and to evaluate your services from a first-hand consumer point of view.

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Modern marketing contains so many pieces – digital ads, print, radio, social media, SEO, email campaigns, and more. Your business might not use every one of these channels, but chances are you use a mix of several. Keeping track of each arm of your marketing strategy is key to understanding the success of your efforts and in helping you shape additional strategies.

Marketing automation helps businesses and marketing leaders manage their campaigns. From planning and publishing content to analyzing performance, automation enables businesses to make smarter decisions and more effectively launch and manage branding building activities.

In fact, 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads using marketing automation software, and 77% had an increase in conversions.

Ultimately, marketing automation can help you run your marketing more efficiently while saving your business time and money. Here’s how:

1. More effective: Small businesses, in particular, are often strapped for resources, and so the ability to get more done, reach more customers, and quickly fix issues is a huge benefit.

1. Less repetition: Marketing automation means that some of your marketing can run on autopilot. Instead of using man-hours to manually upload social media posts or send out emails to every customer for particular actions, you can batch on the front end and let things run and you can set up email campaigns to go out automatically when a customer makes a purchase, signs up for your newsletter, requests a quote, and more. This gives you more time to be creative and conduct customer research that helps you build the best content possible.

1. Better reporting: Marketing automation can give you a better handle on understanding all the different parts of your marketing campaigns and gives you better insight into how your customers are reacting to each of the different facets across channels.

What are the best marketing automation tools for small businesses?

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Organizations, individual business owners and companies are constantly looking for the best employee performance management tools. The use of performance evaluation tools aims at improving the organization as a whole by stimulating and increasing the productivity and performance of employees. Performance evaluation tools also gather individual workforces in a large single business entity with multiple missions and targets to accomplish.

Before the invention of the employee performance measurement tools, the organizations and corporations were dependent on annual performance based on paper reviews. But this method was stressful, clunky and contradicted unbiases. To resolve the glaring problem of the initial method of employee performance measurement, the organization and corporations are now adopting the use of employee performance management tools.

Benefits of Employee Performance Evaluation Tools

The switch from the annual performance paper reviews to employee performance measurement tools did not only increase the employees’ productivity but also the organization’s bottom line and efficiency of various business processes.

7 Essential Employee Performance Measurement Tools

Generally, integrating employee measurement tools with adequate evaluation metrics is certainly the best way to upgrade your workforce. In this regard, the following are 7 essential employee performance measurement tools to use in 2019:

Kissflow HR Cloud

Kissflow HR cloud employee performance tool is a module that helps the business owners to align all the employees working under the same business entity according to the goals, missions, and strategies of the business efficiently. Kissflow HR cloud provides streamlined solutions for employee performance review. Moreover, it also gives leverage to the business owners to customize it according to the unique business requirements so that it can be flexible enough for the business.

It also provides insightful reports that help the organization management to find the best potential employees in the workforce, critical business insights, critical workforce gaps and etc. The key feature of this application is that it triggers the improvement plan alert when an employee’s performance is not up to the mark.

Almost 52% of the organizations are updating their business HR systems with the KissFlow HR cloud module.

Workday

Workday is a compensational employee performance management tool that provides an ideal solution for organizations to analyze the employee’s individual performance. Not only does it allow the user to review the end-to-end performance but it also aligns goals for the workforce.

Although, it is a very powerful and efficient employee performance measurement tool the lack of user manual and the lack of material for training makes it hard for many organizations to use it freely.

BambooHR

BambooHR, a powerful employee performance tool, was originally developed for small to medium-sized businesses and organizations. Through this tool, you can have frequent checks on the performance of the employees on the improvement plan progress.

The most impressive feature of this performance evaluation tool is that it comes with the option to show real-time analytics and performance insights, making it easy for employers to bug out performance issues. However, there are some minor problems with the integration of the application within the company.

Engagedly

Engagedly is an employee performance evaluation tool that is true to its name as it provides the user with an engaging approach to analyze, create and define the performance reviews of the employees. It solves all the rising performance problems that occur in an organization along with robust and powerful features like cascading, goal management, surveys, LMS, rewards, and social collaboration.

However, the dashboard can be pretty confusing for employers who are not tech-savvy.

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The right content marketing tools can help you shape every part of your marketing campaigns from planning a content strategy to managing workflows and deadlines to scheduling and monitoring social media to increasing search page ranking.

Here are some of the best tools that help content marketers do their best work.

1. WordPress: WordPress powers some of the internet’s most popular marketing content. In addition to being able to host and design webpages, it helps businesses publish blogs and has tons of built-in tools to help manage social media updates, increase SEO, and more.

1. Zapier: This tool helps content marketers by integrating their existing apps – like Twitter, Gmail, MailChimp, and dozens of other tools – so that they can better manage their workflows and have more accurate all-around data. If you have contacts in a Google Sheets document, you can use Zapier to easily add your subscriber list to MailChimp.

1. BuzzSumo: With BuzzSumo, you can discover high-performing content to curate and share with followers. You can also use their analysis to help you plan your own content and identify influencers who might be interested in partnering with you.

1. Hootsuite: Hootsuite helps you plan, automate, and analyze your social media channels, all in one place. It helps you customize your social channels and personalize your user conversations.

1. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: This tool helps you create headlines that will get more clicks. It looks at the length, word and character count and previews how your headline will look in Google search results and email subject lines. Headlines are crucial to the success of your content, from search results to blog posts to emails and social media.

1. HubSpot: HubSpot is one of the best all-in-one content marketing tools. It can help you attract more visitors to your website, convert more leads, publish relevant blog content, send email campaigns and A/B test communication.

1. Mintent: Mintent is a tool that helps you manage your entire content marketing process. The content marketing platform helps users create, manage, publish, and measure results for all projects. Their SEO platform helps marketers understand what the actionable next steps are to increase engagement and conversions.

Finding the right tools depends on what your business needs. If you want to focus on creating the most relevant social content, you might want to combine Hootsuite’s scheduling power with BuzzSumo’s set of tools to generate content ideas and connect you with social media influencers.

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Wireless technologies, globalization and wireless collaborations have led to competition in the market. As a consequence, commercial or public banks want to adopt the use of e-commerce products and services in their delivery of services to their valuable customers.

Today, thousands of banks have already adopted the use of e-commerce in their services. However, many people are not taking significant advantage of this innovative collaboration.

Many research studies have also been carried out regarding the participation of commercial banks in e-commerce.

In recent studies, it was revealed that despite using a meaningful and simple structure of adoption of e-commerce, many banks face various challenges in adopting the use of e-commerce in their products and services. A similar study in Kenya showed that the mean of online banking in Kenya was as high as 4.43 despite the fact that they do not use e-commerce as much.

In fact, e-commerce is one of the rising trends in the banking world.

E-Commerce Banking is a Thing

E-commerce in banking generally refers to a commercial activity that deals in trading services and goods through an electronic communication medium. The general activities of e-commerce in banking might include informational communication, payment management, trading and negotiations of financial instruments and transport management.

E-commerce in banking is a part of the electronic banking business and the utmost reason why banks want to participate in E-commerce is that it generates enough profit and revenue. E-commerce, in general, has improved business processes. While banks are currently facing e-communication challenges, it is crucial for them to participate in e-commerce for smooth banking processes.

Reasons Why Banks Want to Participate in E-Commerce

Here are some of the reasons why commercial and public banks want to actively participate in e-commerce to gain e-commerce services and products for their banking processes:

Improved Customer Service

Customer service is important to any business – including banks where the main motive is to gain revenue out of safe-keeping the money of the public. Banks are generally ranked according to their services and customer services. For instance, when a bank entails cutting-edge technology for quick banking processes, it is likely to be more approachable by the public. Great customer service matters when it comes to banking and handling the financial matters of the public.

However, e-commerce upgrades or improves the customer service of the banks,

the main reason why banks want to actively participate in e-commerce.

E-commerce improves the payment management systems, information communication system, trading, and negotiation system, financial instruments and transport management system of a bank. With these services improving, the customers and consumers will have great experience with the bank. It would not only improve the internal business processes but customer service of the bank as well.

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Instant messaging or IM refers to direct online chat between customers and businesses to provide real-time communication message communication over the internet. Instant messaging is critical in business communication and it does wonder as opposed to other communication mediums. But instant messaging in business communication has evolved greatly.

Instant messaging is just like a marketing tactic that helps in automating most of the communication within an organization – and marketing automation can improve your business. Thus, it has become more advanced due to the cutting-edge technology in the last few years.

Is It Worth Investing in Instant Messaging?

As instant messaging is progressing at a quick pace, it’s being used for various different purposes in business communication. But what does instant messaging involve? Instant messaging involves the use of chatbots so that their customers can get more responsive replies to their never-ending queries. Many business owners and entrepreneurs running online businesses are considering using chatbots or tools for instant messaging in business activities. At the workplace, it can increase productivity and customer service in general.

The Radicati  Group reported that:

The number of instant messaging accounts is more than 7 billion. However, this figure is expected to increase with a margin of 6% in the upcoming 4 years. By the end of the year 2023, there would be about 8.9 billion instant messaging accounts.

It is estimated that by the year 2020, the number of smartphone users will reach 6.1 billion and having a smartphone means you can use instant messaging apps for business communication too.

5 Reasons Instant Messaging is Critical for Business

Here are the 5 relevant reasons why instant messaging is critical in business communication and why it has been an integral part of business communication for more than 30 years.

• Cost Savings

Without any doubt, instant messaging for work is by far the most cost-efficient way of communicating with your customers, consumers as well as your employees. Instant messaging work for business communication cuts down the cost in half. Recently, it was revealed that the cost of bad communication reached $37 billion by frequent disconnections.

Fortune companies that have international chains and partners situated in far off places can use instant messaging efficiently and help the company to save their business fortune or business treasure. With an efficient solution for business communication for work, the business partners can schedule meetings, share and conduct presentations, receive or send messages through the communication apps without having to leave the workplace or the premises.

• Improved Communication

Another good reason to use instant messaging for business communication is that it readily improves real-time text communication between employers, employees, co-workers and even the customers.

Through instant messaging, colleagues, business partners and even the consumers can keep in touch with each other and discuss their issues and risen problems with their providers, employers, and colleagues in real-time. Instant messaging for business communication is integral during business operations. For instance, a manager can work remotely and use instant messaging tools to guide his employees.

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Technology moves extraordinarily quickly and it can seem like there is something new coming out every week or every month. New technologies are often driven by visionaries, people who have inspiring ideas for new technologies, but who don’t necessarily have the means to develop them whether that be because of a lack of skills or funding. It is not uncommon for these new technologies to fail almost before they even get going.

One of the main reasons for this is because they are so ahead of their time that the mass market would not fully understand how to use the new technology or have not yet discovered the need for this new technology. A good example of this is electric cars. Electric cars were first being developed as far back as 1828 and people are only beginning to adopt this technology now in the masses.

One such technology that has been successful and that is being integrated into people’s lives more and more every day in the Internet of Things. In some cases, is it so engrained that people do not yet know that some of the devices they are using is powered by or is using the Internet of Things?

What is the Internet of Things?

The Internet of Things is part of what makes devices ‘smart’. Devices that make use of the IoT may have an IoT sim that enables them to connect to the internet and to a network. Examples of devices that may be connected to the Internet of Things include TVs and refrigerators.

In reality, if something can be connected to the internet then it can be part of the Internet of Things. Devices that are connected are able to talk to each other. The data that is transferred between these devices can be collected, analyzed and used to help make people’s lives easier or to help tasks get done quicker.

An example might be a refrigerator that is connected to the Internet of Things. Some refrigerators will be able to tell when you are running slow on supplies and place an order for groceries without any assistance or prompt.

Privacy and Security Concerns

Although the Internet of Things is still really in its infancy, there are already a number of concerns that are being raised around privacy and security. Essentially the smart devices in your home rely on the collection and analysis of data to do their job. Who owns this data, where this data is stored, and whether companies should have access to it are all questions that are currently being debated.

Privacy is another key issue that people are wrestling with. The internet has many great benefits but it can also be very easily misused. Some cases of this misuse have been where people have installed security cameras into their home. Hackers may be able to gain access to these cameras, watch you in your home and know when you are at home and when you are not.

Although the Internet of Things seems like a great and useful tool, key issues like these need to be considered before diving head-first into the world of IoT.

Read more relevant article: 5 Things to Know About IoT Security

It may sound strange, but e-commerce and banking organizations almost work on the same principle. If they don’t get back to their customers soon enough, they’ll most likely lose the customer to the ever-increasing competitors. Thereby, it is important for both e-commerce and banking organizations to be available for their customers 24/7 at any cost.

As per a survey, about 44% of U.S. customers prefer chatbots over humans as customer support.

Chatbots have been around for only a few years and they’ve already gained enough popularity that more and more online businesses are using them to resolve the customers’ never-ending queries. Most of all, chatbots are cheaper and can save up to 30% cost on resolving customer requests per year.

1. Enhance User Experience

Let’s discuss an example: You’re an entrepreneur who spends most of his time traveling. You’re into some products an e-commerce store sells online but you have some queries. Would you wait for 3-5 business for the answers if you mail them? Definitely no!

At the same time, if you have an option to talk to a chatbot and ask about delivery duration, charges, product, and any other thing you’d want to know, you’re most likely to become a regular customer. That’s how chatbots are revolutionizing the user experience in e-commerce stores. For the same reason, the use of chatbots in banking has increased over the past few years.

2. Generating More Leads

Those days are long gone when cold calls or newsletters were enough to take your online business to its full potential – be it an e-commerce store or banking organization.

The advent of innovative chatbots has revolutionized the customer support phase – evolving your e-commerce or banking website into a less-frustrating platform. Whether you’re a finance manager or e-commerce manager, you’re always on the verge to stay one step ahead of the competitors. Thus, now is the right time to add a unique feature which can help in generating more leads.

3. Frequent Feedback Collection

The advancement in the natural language process and computing has given rise to the more generic chatbots which are able to handle more convincing conversations. In fact, AI integrated chatbots are able to handle dozens of customers’ queries that are redundant.

For example, if you get over a hundred questions about delivery charges or duration per month, you can simply program your chatbot to answer accordingly.

Moreover, if you’re looking to enhance your bank’s service and eliminate the downsides, the use of chatbots in enhancing the customer experience and asking for feedback at the end of the call has shown considerate outcomes for many banking organizations.

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Businesses have more ways than ever to gather customer data that helps them shape their marketing and customer communications. But privacy and data security are growing to become higher customer priorities and businesses need to be able to balance collecting the information they need to grow their business and also protect their customers and preserve their trust.

Customers want personalized offers from businesses and relevant information as consumers, but they want to know what information is being collected and what it’s being used for. After the Facebook information scandal, understanding the ways that your business can collect information on customers and how you can communicate that to your customers while keeping their privacy at the forefront.

Forbes points out, “Location tracking lives in everything from Apple Maps to Tinder, Uber, and WeChat. Every Samsung phone, for example, uses its APIs to set geotags for photography. Those APIs are part of Pilgrim — a passive, always-on, detection engine.” Many consumers are not aware of the consequences of the opt-ins they make on their devices, though businesses technically provide privacy policies to all users who grant access to their apps or websites.

Digital Advertising and customer data

Here are the other ways that businesses use digital advertising can be used to connect to customer information.

1. Cookies

According to one Medium writer, “Cookies help companies track visitors, delineate between multiple page views and single visits, personalize landing pages and allow users to stay logged in.” While much of the purpose of cookies does help to save customers time, it also helps businesses collect and track data. In fact, cookies help retarget customers with digital advertising and offer after a customer visits their website. It’s also a huge factor in the GDPR changes and policies that were created. Companies find out where users spend the most time on their site to assess what parts of their copy and design are working best, which can information

2. Heatmapping

This is a method built into some CX, UX, and analytics programs that help companies understand user behavior and customer experiences on their sites.

3. GPS

As mentioned above digital advertisers, businesses, and marketing professionals use GPS data to store location data. This can tell marketers the kind of places you visit, what time you visit, and even use your phone signal to track your location in a store. This can be used by savvy marketers to send promotions and push notifications to the customer devices, encouraging more purchases and relevant brand exposure.

4. Social media

Obviously, social media digital ads tell businesses what content that customers are interacting with. Marketers have access to large datasets that help them target specific segments of customers, helping them hone in on very detailed groups of people, from homeowners with car hobbies to students with an interest in certain kinds of music. This information allows marketers to offer the most relevant dl.

5. User behavior

We all are aware that cars, planes, computers, etc. have embedded trackers and sensors that send data constantly to various locations. This data is mainly used to not only improve the performance of your device but also to understand your interactions with it and create personalized offers that might force you to buy something from.

It’s clear that digital marketers have more and more ways to find out what makes their customer base tick, what’s useful and interesting to them, and what’s likely to grab attention and drive engagement. Digital ads are both informed by information collected and able to collect data to help create more informed marketing campaigns and even drive product development.

If your business employs any of these digital data collection methods above, it’s important to communicate to customers what particular pieces of information are being stored and how they’re being used to communicate with them regarding their preferences. It’s also becoming increasingly important that businesses aren’t selling their customer information to other companies, as this is one of the easiest ways to break the trust with your customers and lose their business.

Finding the right balance in your digital advertising efforts between using data to inform them and also collecting data from their use will be an important focus in digital marketing. There will need to be more attention paid to assuring customers that not only is your business compliant with data privacy law but also that you value their trust and won’t abuse any information you’ve collected.

Read the related article: Digital Marketing Ideas for B2B Companies

In today’s modern business world, security is a high priority and payroll internal controls help you secure your business information and protect confidential employee information. In addition to protecting against data leaks and ensuring that sensitive information remains confidential, it also helps to prevent the possibility of financial fraud. Employees are one of the most important assets of your business and healthy HR practices help impact and ensure your bottom line and budget.

Patriot Software notes, “Payroll internal controls are the procedures your business follows to protect its payroll information. Payroll controls and procedures prevent employees from accessing confidential information. Internal controls also prevent employees from stealing money from your business through overpayments and false time records. In large businesses, payroll internal controls involve dividing payroll tasks among departments and employees. Dividing tasks ensures many people have their eyes on the payroll process, meaning someone has less ability to commit fraud. With your small business, dividing payroll tasks is probably not practical.”

Payroll internal controls best practices for your business

Not matter what size your business, it’s important to pay payroll internal controls. Here are the payroll internal controls best practices your business should know.

1. Change report

A change report runs every payroll cycle that can help you identify anything that’s changed since the last payroll run. This is a good way to keep an eye on the goings-on of your HR operations, allowing you to monitor anything different, such as payroll rate changes, addition of employees, or employee bank account changes and to ensure that terminated employees aren’t continuing to be paid after their departure. Not only can this prevent any unauthorized changes, but it also makes it easier to approve changes that have been requested. It’s advisable that this report is run by someone outside of direct HR control, such as the CIO or other executives.

2. Review the payroll

A payroll internal controls best practice is to continue reviewing all payroll registers before and after it’s submitted to anyone running the payroll, particularly 3rd-party payroll company. This process is an additional step to what should be a straightforward payroll process, but this kind of review is necessary as a step to prevent theft, data leaks, and theft.

3. Automate

Kreischer Miller reminds businesses, “Many payroll packages now offer an electronic timekeeping module directly in the payroll system. At the end of each week, supervisors can log into the module and approve employee hours, which are then automatically transferred to the payroll processing module. By eliminating the use of manual time cards, organizations reduce the risk of error through data entry, while also making the payroll cycle more efficient.” Not only does automation make things faster and more efficient, but it also creates reduced risk of financial errors for businesses.

4. Use access control

Two vital system elements will help safeguard your HR and employee data. Payroll systems should be, whenever possible run electronically. Any physical files that need to be stored should be restricted to those with physical keys or access cards. Use digital checks and direct deposit whenever possible, making sure that check stock is kept in a secure location and regularly inventoried.

5. Create segregation of duties

In some businesses, having different people performing different tasks related to payroll can reduce the risk of too much access. At Kreischer Miller notes, “Sufficiently segregating responsibilities will help to control the risk of unauthorized changes or transactions.” This means that only certain individuals can access the entirety of the payroll system information log, for instance. For some companies, this kind of segregation of work can create too many specialized roles for some department or series of tasks. Other companies aren’t large enough to have that many employees involved in the first place. For those who are, it might make sense to divide responsibilities this way

• the processing of payroll running within the payroll systems 
• access and input into the general finance ledger
• the maintenance and management of personnel information files
• approval of time reporting
• the distribution of payroll checks

Protecting your payroll is part of protecting your business. Establish payroll internal best practices keeps your finances in order and keeping employees from being able to take advantage of your business. Ensuring that all your HR employees are trained in the correct and accurate processes is essential in maintain safety in your HR and payroll operations.

Read more related articles: Best Practices for Using Payroll in the IT Industry

When HR team recruit employees, they focus on several things to identify the best candidates for the job. From company and cultural fit to how the experience will translate into a specific position and help elevate the business, HR has an important responsibility to hire the kind of employees who can and will work collaboratively and successfully towards the goals of their position and the mission of the business. Businesses and HR teams are also smartly turning to performance management processes and tools to help them increase the effectiveness of their employee performance and maximize their contributions. A better performance management system has been linked to better employee retention and companies reaching more of their business goals.

Why is performance management important in accomplishing organizational goals?

A modern performance management process takes a 360-degree view of performance management, not just focusing on the performance appraisal or annual review, but integrating feedback and goal review throughout the year. This helps boost employee productivity and morale, as well as gives businesses a chance to continue to align how an employee’s contributions with overall business goals.

The importance of performance management in accomplishing organization goals

Here are several ways that effective performance management can help businesses accomplish more of their organizational goals.

• Employees who are recognized and rewarded for their performance are more likely to be invested and engaged in their jobs and responsibilities. Regular performance management that spans the day to day can keep employees motivated, which will drive them to be more productive and invested in their tasks, all of which roll up to supporting organizational goals.
• Performance management helps to empower employees. Managers and supervisors who connect with their employees about business happenings and goals give their employees a better sense of where they fit into the big picture. This kind of perspective can drive performance. When employees know why their job matters and how it fits into the overall goals of an organization, they are often both more motivated to perform better and also in ways that help the business reach milestones or align better with goals. For instance, if a finance professional knows that their job isn’t just to examine expense reports to prevent fraud and because that’s was required of the role, but also because greater fiduciary responsibility allows businesses to reinvest in technologies that could lead to business growth, promotions, and bonuses, that finance employee may be more motivated towards excellence in their role.
• Continued and ongoing performance management gives managers and supervisors an opportunity to regularly assess how an employee is being used within the business.
• Asking questions like “are these job responsibilities the best use of this employee’s time and skills or are there other tasks they can pivot to create more value for the business?” and “are these job responsibilities necessary to move us closer to our business goals or are they just a continuation of doing things the way they’ve always been done?” Regular performance management can help employers understand if their employees have the right skill sets to be moved into more value-adding positions and also refine positions to better reflect work that helps to better meet the overall business goals.
• Ongoing performance management can support better employer-employee relationships. More 1-on1 discussions can improve a boss-employer dynamic more than meeting once in a while or just annually to discuss an annual review and raise. Better relationships can lead to more engagement and also encourage employees to reach out to their boss if they have a question or want to make a suggestion — both of which can lead to the more effective realization of company goals.
• Employees and managers who meet regularly to discuss employee goals and overall business objectives are able to define not just what the organizational goals are but also strategize around how the employee can best meet their goals — which in turn support company goals. Overall, effective employee performance management helps to better align how individual employees work together and in tandem to support organizational goals. If there is a question as to how an employee or role is effectively supporting company objectives, that’s usually a sign that HR and leadership should have a larger conversation regarding employee and roles.

Performance management plays a huge role in the overall success of a company, not just an individual’s career. Remembering why performance management is important in accomplishing organization goals is an important step in being able to continue business growth and ensure long-term success.

View the Related article: Top Performance Management Techniques and Benefits You Should Know

As an HR manager, performance evaluator, or HR director, many people misunderstood the true meaning of performance management. If you think that performance management merely means to assess your employee’s performance against the assigned task, you’re probably wrong. In fact, performance management is a whole system rather than a task.

According to the 2018 CEB calculation, a company employing over 10,000 people spends about $35 million a year on performance reviews alone. That is a huge number, isn’t it?

Best performance management practices include management practices that are focused on helping your employees in two ways:

• Take their expertise to its full potential
• Increase their satisfaction

Have you considered these two objectives while trying to streamline your performance management tactics as an HR manager? The answer is probably NO. Perhaps, you have left one out of the overall process or system.

Best Performance Management Practices

With its never-ending benefits, more and more enterprises are now upgrading and focusing on their performance management system. It is important to analyze the frequency with which employees are evaluated, training of hiring manager, desired goals, alignment, and actual output.

A Human Resource Management Study in 2014 found that more than 50% of HR managers rated their company B or C+ in performance management. 23% of HR managers gave C grade while only two percent of HR managers gave their companies A.

Looking for a change? Well, here are 5 best performance management practices HR managers should know:

1. Different Shift in Feedback Frequency

Those days are long gone when the performance management process was limited to annual feedback reports and more. The advancement in the IT sector has given rise to performance management systems that help in streamlining the employee performance management process.

More and more companies are now abandoning the annual performance review — replacing it with a real-time performance review. Best performance management practices allow organizations to keep track of real-time, regular feedback by HR managers, customers, and co-workers.

It’s not the only way around. While HR is busy evaluating the best out of the crowd with real-time stats, employees also have the option to report to HR for any complaints. In simple words, a performance management system is used for constructive criticism, immediate feedback, and actionable insights.

When combined, this data can serve as a huge deal to address employees and groups issues and address them accordingly.

2. More Conversations

There is a great need for redesigning the annual or quarterly exercise of performance reviews. This time of the year comes with a lot of inducing negative emotions of HR managers and employees for each other. In fact, both sides end up having some really bad experiences as the evaluation process ends.

Thus, it is in the best interest of the organization, HR, and its employees to get rid of the annual review system. In doing so, managers must find adequate ways to speak with their employees.

For a better assessment, it is best to talk to the struggling employees more often before marking the feedback. Again, frequent feedbacks work best to increase HR interaction with employees — leading to productivity and growth of employees.

3. Effective Management Training

Newly hired HR managers and performance evaluators struggle when trying to understand the organization’s product, service, goals, and aim. In fact, best performance management practices are directly associated with the training of HR manager per company’s goals.

It means that managers also need to be trained well and taught leadership qualities to help employees succeed. Yes, it’s not only about struggling employees — but managers also matter!

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Websites are the backbone of every online business, and they need to ensure maximum security for the users. Majority of the sites do not have a secure HTTPS website, or they do not know how to use it properly. This can pose a considerable risk for businesses that need to safeguard the privacy of their customer data which might otherwise be misused or stolen by hackers.

Thus, installing an SSL certificate for your business website will prove to be useful for encrypting sensitive data and information by instilling greater confidence among your customers.

What is an SSL Certificate and why is it required?

SSL certificate helps to encrypt the data while passing it between web servers and websites. In general sense, the data is locked and can only be unlocked by the intended recipient so that all the sensitive information may be protected. Also, it provides authentication for your website and helps in building trust among your customers.

Benefits of SSL:

Protecting the privacy of users:

SSL protects your site even if it doesn’t manage sensitive information by offering privacy, security and ensuring data integrity for your website. The data which is shared across computer networks may be encrypted and becomes inaccessible to others and may be useful in preventing thefts.

Assurance to users:

SSL also builds trust among visitors and assures them about the website’s authenticity. SSL assures users that their online information will be passed through a secured channel.

Helps improve your site speed:

Installing HTTP certificate can help in improving the performance of your website, making a lot faster and helps in your search engine optimization efforts as well.

Improves the user experience:

Website security is a key factor to all users, as most of them would be apprehensive about sharing their personal information with anyone. But with SSL certificate, they are confident of making transactions on your site. Thus, SSL certificates can help in boosting your website conversion rates and engage more targeted visitors to your site.

However, different types of SSL certificates may be used depending on your business requirements. For example, multi-domain Certificates or UCC SSL certificates is more cost-effective and can secure different level of subdomains and domains in a single certificate.

Top risks of not having an SSL certificate on your website

Misuse of data:

If you do not have an SSL certificate on your website, then all the confidential information on your site might be accessed by hackers. This may lead to leakage of personal data of your customers, including payment details which may be compromised. These days, hackers can easily recognize vulnerable sites and cause disruptions which can be catastrophic for your business.

Downranking of websites:

Google has been working consistently over the years to encourage SSL encryption and in 2017, released Chrome 68 update for identifying unsecured sites. Secured websites may be identified using a green padlock before the URL. It prevents any third party from accessing traffic that may be passed between your web server and the browser.

In the absence of an SSL certificate, your website may be marked as insecure by Google and rated as not trustworthy because of which it might lose its rankings on the SERP.

MITM attacks:

MITM or Man in the Middle is a kind of attack where an attacker creates interference between two ends (server and browser). The attacker secretly alters the communication so that it can result in losses. Without an SSL certificate, all the communication traveling from the webserver to the client is accessible, which makes it easy for intruders to target such type of unsecured communication.

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If you’re looking to give your modern organization a competitive edge, you will likely look at the efficiency of your performance management system. You’ll also need to research relevant HR performance management software to complement the running of this system.

Purchasing performance management software represents a serious investment. You want to find the right solution to help you boost engagement, improve employee performance and facilitate communication. To streamline the process, we have compiled this HR buyer’s guide to continuous performance management software.

Why Your Company Needs Effective Performance Management

Due to outdated performance management tools, such as the annual performance review and stacked ranking , performance management doesn’t always enjoy the best reputation. But effective performance management is critical to the success of your company in terms of employee engagement, productivity, performance, and morale — not to mention organizational growth.

Performance management techniques, such as regular performance coaching conversations can keep employees on track and motivated to achieve their SMART objectives. With the right performance management system, these SMART objectives will support and complement organizational goals, meaning the entire company thrives.

To truly benefit from performance management, however, companies must ensure they are forward-thinking and progressive while keeping up with the latest and most promising performance management trends.

You Need Performance Management Software to Support Your Processes

As companies become more agile and fast-moving , you need the right technology to facilitate growth and keep you competitive. The proper performance management software can help you track, manage and analyze employee performance while promoting in-the-moment feedback and communication. If you’ve been relying on pen and paper to support your performance management system, it is high time for an upgrade.

You should consider investing in continuous performance management software for the following reasons. CPM software can:

1. Improve business outcomes.
3. Help to develop employees by tracking employee development objectives.
4. Provide the ability to give and receive real-time feedback.
5. Help you align individual SMART goals with company objectives.
6. Make work more meaningful for your employees.
7. Support regular performance conversations to improve employee-manager relationships.
8. Provide instant reports to keep you updated with the performance of your employees and teams.
9. Identify opportunities for employee advancement and succession planning.

Analyze Your Company’s HR and Performance Management Needs

Before you can decide what continuous performance management platform to invest in, you need to address and analyze your company’s unique HR and performance management needs. Your research could take the form of a comprehensive survey to highlight and uncover pain points. Make this survey company-wide to show your employees everyone’s feedback is valued and important.

You can ask your employees questions, such as:

• Do you understand what’s expected of you at work and in your role?
• Do you know how your particular goals support company objectives?
• Do you feel you receive constructive and consistent feedback?
• Do you have an honest, authentic and transparent relationship with your manager?
• Do you feel your feedback is valued?
• Do you think you are being kept up to date with the goings-on of the company?
• Do you think you are improving and advancing in terms of your skills?
• Does the company provide the right support for training and development?
• Are you happy with your opportunities for advancement, while understanding how to advance?
• Do you feel appreciated and acknowledged?
• How do you feel about the current status of performance reviews in terms of frequency and efficacy?

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